Your Right to Know

NEW YORK — A subset of visitors to New York looks, on the surface, just like the rest. Some are
high-profile, like the boxer this year, and the football player, and the tea party leader from
California. They are joined by the anonymous.

What sets them apart is what each brings along on a visit to the city: a handgun. The guns are
legally owned, with the home-state permits all in order. The visitors have locked the gun in a box
and checked it at the local airport, as they were told to do by the airline. But for these
visitors, the trip to New York almost certainly will end in handcuffs and felony weapons charges,
and their flights home will leave without them.

“They’re so used to carrying it,” said Dennis B. Coppin, a lawyer who has represented defendants
in airport gun arrests. He described clients who don’t realize that different laws apply in New
York. They had tried to do the right thing.

“They contact the airline and say, ‘I want to bring my gun with me. How do I do this?’ ” said
Martin D. Kane, a criminal-defense lawyer in Queens. The travelers are told that the gun must be
unloaded and packed in a preapproved lockbox.

The visitor arrives in New York and retrieves the gun. No problem there.

Trouble arrives upon their return to La Guardia Airport or Kennedy Airport to fly home. The
visitors repeat the procedure practiced at their home airport, presenting the gun to a gate agent
to be checked. Only this time, the gate agent calls police officers from the Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey, which oversees the airports. The gun owners are then placed under arrest.

In 2012, 42 people were arrested for gun possession in the two airports, according to the Queens
district attorney’s office. Like many others arrested in New York, the gun owners can wait in jail
for a day or longer for a hearing before a judge.

With the exception of high-profile defendants, most of those arrested remain anonymous after
they make a plea deal, as they often do, and their records are sealed. But a defendant in a similar
case, Bobby Glen Jackson, provided the point of view of fish-out-of-water gun owners. He said he
did not think twice about bringing his pistol to New York from North Carolina in April. When he
went to visit the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum and realized that guns were forbidden, he
hid his under a chair cushion in a hotel lobby, prompting a huge police response and his
arrest.

In a vast majority of cases, the defendant is allowed to plead guilty to a far-lesser charge, a
violation, and pay a fine. There is one thing the defendants do not get back: their guns. Those are
confiscated and destroyed.